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Friday, February 20, 2015

Why The Media Is Losing The Digital Migration Debate

For nearly a week now, three of Kenya’s major privately-owned
TV stations have been off air due to a row with the industry regulator over
migration to a digital platform. The stations, NTV, Citizen TV and KTN, which
together account for the vast majority of TV viewership in the country (they
claim up to 90 percent), have had a long running and convoluted battle with the
Communications Authority essentially demanding a license to broadcast their own
content as opposed to handing it over to the two carriers the government has
licensed.

It is said that truth is often the first casualty of war.
This has been no exception. As both sides have sought to sway public opinion to
their cause, honesty and objectivity have been tossed out the window. On the
one hand, the government has tried to paint it as a fight
to tame intransigent, monopolistic-minded media companies scared of the level
field that comes with digital migration. On the other, the companies have
portrayed it as a struggle
against a deaf, authoritarian-minded regime intent on auctioning off national
resources to the Chinese (one of the licensed carriers is Chinese).

While there has been more than enough mud to go round, and
though the incompetence
of the regulator is hard to ignore, it is clear that the TV companies seem to be coming off worst. The are probably two reasons for this. Most Kenyans don't watch TV and those that do have a hard time trusting the media.

Let's start with the latter. The merits of it's case aside, government’s propaganda has tapped into a rich vein of
distrust and contempt for the media, one that, ironically, has grown out of the
fraternity’s uncritical embrace of the Uhuru Kenyatta administration.

The Kenyan press is struggling with the legacy of its anodyne
reporting during the flawed 2013 election and subsequent reluctance to
challenge the official narrative and government conduct on most issues and
events. These include during the President’s trial at the International
Criminal Court, the responses to terrorist attacks, including the attack on the
Westgate Mall and the targeting of the Somali and Muslim communities, as well
as the continuing demonization of civil society.

Further, the TV stations' fascination with Mexican soaps and Nigerian movies, when most television consumers are mainly interested in the news, cannot do their reputation much good.

The media"s one-sided reporting
of the digital migration impasse has not helped matters. Journalists have seemed either unable or
unwilling to separate the interests of media conglomerates from those of the
public. On the contrary, they have simply tried to sell the company line as the national cause. This is not
new. Research
carried out in 2012 found that “the line between media owners and editors has
increasingly been blurred as the latter are co-opted into the formers’ domain,
meaning the editors no longer exclusively pursue professionalism.”

If poll numbers are to be believed, public trust in the
media is very brittle. Over three years ago when one survey
found 77 percent of respondents saying they trusted the media. Just four months
after the 2013 election, this had dropped
to 46 percent before rising to 68 percent in November and collapsing
again to 43 percent in March last year. The lesson here? Public trust is a
commodity the Kenyan media takes for granted at its peril. As Peter Oborne recently wrote
in his resignation statement as chief political commentator of the UK’s Telegraph: “There is a purpose to journalism, and it
is not just to entertain. It is not to pander to political power, big
corporations and rich men. [The media has a] duty to tell … the truth.”

The other reason the TV companies are losing this is that most of the country doesn't watch TV. “Starve
the city dwellers and they riot; starve the peasants and they die. If you were
a politician, which would you choose?" asked an aid-worker in Lloyd
Timberlake’s 1988 book, Africa in Crisis. The current “crisis” has proven that
not all audiences are created equal. Some matter more than others.

A relatively small, TV-owning minority punches above its
weight in political terms. Two-thirds of Kenyan households do not actually own
a television set, but politicians are scrambling to cater to the needs of the
one-third that do, even altering their calendars to accommodate them. The
launch of the OKOA Kenya campaign, for example, has been postponed
until the standoff is resolved, with opposition leader, Raila Odinga, declaring
“There can be no amendment of the constitution without the people and their can
be no people without the media."

The fact is, despite radio being far and away the main
source of news for the vast majority of Kenyans, the fact is TV is king in urban
areas. The medium has overthrown the newspaper as the mediator of elite political discourse in the country.

For the rest of the country, the promise of impressive
clarity and variety is largely empty. Debates about cost and availability of
set-top boxes are largely irrelevant for the 70 percent of the population who
cannot even afford TV sets and the 80 percent who have no electricity to run
them on. As Eng Francis Wangusi, the Director-General of the Communications
Authority said
recently, “If somebody can buy and maintain a TV in their house, that person is
not poor.” He could have added that most Kenyans are poor.

Beyond what the media have got wrong, perhaps we as a country should consider expanding the scope of the
discussion beyond just digital TV migration. According to one survey, by 2011, 93
percent of Kenyan households owned a mobile phone. Maybe the phone could do for
TV what it has done for money transfer and banking. Mobile TV could allow the
poor to access the digital TV services that are now slated to be the preserve of
a lucky few. So instead of only talking about STBs, digital transmitters and
distribution licenses, perhaps our tech and policy wonks could also spend some
of the time debating the merits of providing affordable mobile TV to all.